The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  Then the conductor announced that the star of the evening (the celebrated Madame Nordica) had requested that Erika von Kessler sing another aria before the main program began.

  In the darkness of the stage Erika appeared again, the sleeves of her white gown diaphanous. The acoustics of the Music Room were so pure, the resonance so intimate, that the audience might have been enclosed inside one perfect, wooden instrument. He could see the stage light reflected in her eyes.

  “In quali eccessi, o numi, in quai misfatti

  orribili, tremendi, è avvolto il sciagurato! . . .”

  Ravell recognized the aria from Don Giovanni. He could not understand the exact lyrics, but he knew he was hearing the war cry of a woman betrayed, the anguish of a woman who loved and pitied an amoral man.

  Erika was so close that he saw the perspiration across the bridge of her nose. He saw the color of her blue-gray eyes, and wondered if she would turn to look at him. She did not do so. He knew he was staring at a woman who might be carrying his child, though she had no inkling that this could be so. For the only time in his life, he had deliberately tried to impregnate a woman. Three times during Peter’s absence, Erika had visited the office, and Ravell had persuaded her to cooperate. (“But I’ve promised your husband—”) Three times since Peter’s departure, Ravell had placed his own seed inside her.

  Even a raped woman knew what had happened to her. Erika had no suspicion.

  In the mad, gorgeous music that possessed her, he heard strains of his own goodness and evil. How often did a man gaze at a woman, having done what he had done, without her possibly knowing?

  He wondered what compelled him to take such a risk. The dread of disappointing the von Kesslers? The need to impress them? That was part of it. Soon—through no fault of his own—they might cast him aside and move on to another specialist. He told himself that her suffering would deepen the longer it went on. But another truth was this: he did not want to give her up. He wanted to keep her from leaving him.

  Onstage she sang of the doom she foresaw: the world was closing in on her lover, a man entangled in unspeakable crimes. Outraged fathers and husbands hunted him, ruined daughters and wronged women wanted revenge. The welling up of injustice shuddered through Erika.

  Suppose, under the white veils of her dress, his child now grew? No one must know—not even twenty years from now. He blinked in sudden terror for himself. If anyone learned the truth, no patient could ever entrust herself to him again. Such a thing could never be forgiven.

  “Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata:

  infelice, oh Dio! mi fa. . . .”

  He had never heard her sing an aria so dramatic before. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to recover from his flash of fright.

  She left the stage wrung out, her hair falling from its pins.

  At the evening’s close, Madame Nordica sang “Let the Bright Seraphim” for an encore, the same chestnut she’d been feeding her worshippers for many years. The diva’s hard, polished voice left Ravell cold. He hurried from the concert room as soon as he could and found Erika at a side door, where a circle of enthusiasts surrounded her. She smiled and reached over strangers’ heads and tucked her hot hand inside his, just a fleeting squeeze of recognition before she pulled it away.

  She smiled at everyone and no one. She looked dazed, as though she couldn’t decipher the words being spoken to her, her eyes unfocused by candles and torches and the glory of the evening, her head still ringing with Mozart, perhaps. And why shouldn’t she be elated? Madame Nordica had requested that she sing.

  “Are you coming to the office next Thursday?” Ravell called out. “I’ll see you then.”

  She called back to him over the heads of others: “Oh—there’s something I must tell you—I’ll tell you on Thursday.” More bodies crushed together in the passageway, and other musicians and singers pressed her to join them for a private celebration. Before she disappeared through a doorway, Erika sent a fleeting wave in Ravell’s direction. He wondered if she already sensed—as women sometimes did—that she had a child inside her, but that seemed unlikely. It was really too soon for her to know.

  As he turned from Erika, he noticed another figure standing nearby in the hallway. It was Caroline Farquahr. After rushed excuses to her companions, she must have followed him in hopes of a private exchange.

  With the ice of resentment in her eyes, she looked at him, and Ravell wondered what she had just witnessed. The quaver in his voice as he’d called out nervously to congratulate Erika on her singing? The worshipful hunch in his shoulders? The heat in his face? Caroline had clearly caught hints of something.

  Ravell tipped his hat to her, raised one arm in greeting, and without stopping he followed a herd of dark overcoats into the night.

  9

  On a May morning Erika sat on the bed’s edge, pulling on her stockings, her head ripe with plans. She caught herself singing fragments of another Handel aria, over and over again.

  “Oh, that I on wings could rise,

  Swiftly sailing through the skies . . .”

  She was due to depart for Italy in just nine more days, and she decided she must go that very afternoon to her father’s house and inform him of what was to come. She had booked her passage on the White Star Line’s Canopic, intending to flee before Peter’s return. Until now she had not found the courage to tell her father or her brother or any family member that she meant to leave her marriage and find her future on another continent. Only her voice teacher, Magdalena, knew that years might pass before any of them saw Erika again.

  Even the servants had no inkling that anything extraordinary was afoot. For weeks Erika had been walking to Magdalena’s house every day, smuggling a few items at a time—a satchel filled with undergarments, a parasol that would shade her from the Tuscan sun, a costume bag containing a long cape she might need for winter in Florence. From a dressmaker she had ordered an Eton suit with a white satin collar, as well as a Princess gown in burgundy chiffon velvet. She had arranged for these things to be delivered to Magdalena’s Beacon Street address, where Erika had packed them into brand-new trunks she kept hidden there.

  She wanted Papa to know that she did not mean to abandon him. Although he still practiced medicine and looked remarkably robust for a man of his age, his blond walrus moustache and sideburns had gone white and his heart was weak. Other men with similar circulatory ailments sometimes left the house in the morning and fell onto the pavement, dead of apoplexy before they rounded the front gate. If she sailed for another world, Papa might not be there to greet her ship upon her next visit.

  As Erika turned the key and let herself inside her childhood home, she saw that things remained unchanged. Papa had not yet returned from his rounds at the hospital, though the maid informed her that he would appear soon. She looked around, trying to memorize a place she did not expect to see again for years. The immense furniture felt rooted in the rooms. As always, her late mother’s Spanish fan dangled from a knob on the foyer mirror. On the floor of Papa’s study, a pair of men’s Chinese slippers rested in the corner—the same style of slippers he’d worn for a quarter century.

  Shortly after Erika’s seventh birthday, her mother had died. Her own memories of Mama were distressingly few. Her mother used to lie on a wine-colored chaise longue writing letters. Erika could no longer see her mother’s face, yet Mama’s hands were imprinted in her memory: long, tapered fingers that smelled of gardenia soap. While Mama braided Erika’s hair, Erika had sat erect, savoring the lovely chilly feeling as the strands were drawn upward, and she felt Mama’s cool breaths upon her nape.

  For several years Papa had wished to keep things exactly as they had been prior to his wife’s death.

  “Where are her magazines?” he had demanded of the chambermaid one evening. As a child, Erika had watched from a doorway as he stumbled around like a man who returns to find his house burglarized. “Where are her powders that used to be on the bathroom shelf? Where are the perfume bo
ttles from her vanity?”

  The chambermaid, thinking she was doing the widower a gentle favor, had concluded that it was time to stop dusting a dead woman’s cosmetics.

  “I’ve taken it all in boxes to the attic, sir,” the maid had said.

  From the doorway Erika had noticed how Papa drove splayed fingers across his scalp, leaving his hair in unruly spikes. In a pained voice he told the chambermaid, “I want everything replaced. Exactly as it was.”

  Her father was a doctor who treated members of the Back Bay’s most prominent families. His practice was located on the ground floor of his house, distinctive for its twin archways. Patients entered under the right arch, family under the left. These days his consulting room was typically filled with elderly widows dressed in black, their white silk hair slipping from under their bonnets. Patients sometimes noticed Erika on the sidewalk as she came to visit her father. They caught her hand and rolled it in their own, as they had been apt to do ever since she was a child. (Poor, motherless daughter of Doctor William von Kessler!)

  “Your papa,” one effused, “can describe every symptom I’ve been experiencing without my even telling him.”

  In winter, wreaths of apples and evergreens—anonymously given—hung from their front door. At Christmas, Papa’s doorbell would ring and a fruitcake would appear on the steps of fresh, unshoveled snow. A carriage would pull away quickly, leaving no sign of who’d left it—except for footprints in the snow from a lady’s heeled galoshes.

  “Erika,” Papa said. “Forgive me for my opinion, but this plan may be the greatest mistake of your life.”

  Her father blurred before her. Tears melted like hard bits of ice in her eyes. “Don’t tell me that someday, with luck, I’ll have children,” she said desperately, “because you know that won’t happen.”

  “But how will you live,” Papa asked, “without a husband to support you?”

  “I can manage on the income from the Bell Street property that Mama left to us. I can live simply. Gerald can mail me a check for my share of her estate, just as he does now.”

  Papa lit his meerschaum and puffed calmly on the carved ivory pipe. “Why not take a summer in Milan?” he suggested. “Immerse yourself in all the opera you’d like. Go every night to La Scala. Why not?” he said. “After all you’ve been through, I’m sure Peter would understand. Perhaps he’d go with you.”

  “I am not yearning for a long holiday—I am embracing a career!”

  She got up and opened one of the long drapes and looked down at the stunted saplings planted along the mall that divided Commonwealth Avenue. She let the drape fall and turned to her father again.

  She pressed her fingers against her windpipe. “Your daughter,” she whispered at him fiercely, “has been given this voice for a reason.”

  “So,” Magdalena said, “how did things go with your father yesterday?”

  Dripping, Magdalena stood up in the bathtub. Her maid took a hand mitt foaming with special soap and rubbed the older woman’s thighs and buttocks with a hard, massaging motion. Magdalena believed such rub-downs lessened peau d’orange—the lumps and dimples that marred a female’s lower body.

  “It was unpleasant,” Erika said.

  Apart from professors at the New England Conservatory, Magdalena was the first and only voice coach Erika had ever had. Magdalena was also the first woman Erika had ever seen naked. The summer she was nine, when she first arrived at Magdalena’s town house for her morning vocal lesson, the older woman would often be running late. During her career as a diva, she had gotten into the habit of falling into bed very late, and being slow to rise. “Come upstairs, don’t be bashful,” Magdalena used to call down the stairwell to Erika. “Come up and keep me company while I’m getting dressed.”

  Today, just as she had done long ago, Magdalena sat at the vanity table and combed wet tendrils upward with her fingers and locked them against her head with tortoiseshell pins.

  The dressing gown slipped from her shoulders as Magdalena stood, and she discarded it across the bed. Magdalena strode around the bedroom with the same athletic self-assurance that she had exhibited as a much younger woman, oblivious to whatever assessments her maid or Erika might make as they observed her unclothed sixty-year-old body. “I like to delay as long as possible before I lock myself into a corset,” Magdalena said. “Not that I approve of wearing no corset at all—but for a certain period every day, I think a woman’s skin should breathe.” Magdalena was European, and Europeans had a reverence for skin.

  After Magdalena got dressed, they went downstairs to the solarium, a room shaped like a glassed-in gazebo—their favorite place to talk. The room was as humid as a tropical forest with its orchids, moist potted soil, and Kentia palms that brushed the ceiling. The solarium windows wept steam.

  “Have you seen my amaryllis?” Magdalena touched the petals like long tongues. Even in winter when the solarium was cold, they sat here—Magdalena in a wool cape, Erika in black fur. They would cover their laps with crocheted blankets, while hot bricks toasted their feet. Through a hexagon of windows, they watched snow slant and melt against the brick sidewalk.

  When Magdalena heard how Papa had responded to Erika’s news, the older woman shook her head. Earrings shivered like raindrops on her lobes. “This is the great difference between your father and me,” she declared. “He’s a conventional man, not a person who understands that to be a true artist, one must burn all one’s ships.”

  As a child Erika used to dream of her father and Magdalena together. If only Magdalena’s husband—that long, thin businessman who walked with legs like two stiff canes—if only he would become ill with tuberculosis, as her mother had; if only that husband of hers would die!

  As a child, Erika had longed for Magdalena to throw open the doors in the dark, shadowy corridors of the house where she and Papa and her brother, Gerald, lived; she imagined that Magdalena would replace the black walnut woodwork and lighten the walls with fresh paint. Just as in Magdalena’s town house, light would be reflected from mirrors, and there would be long windows everywhere. . . . Or perhaps Papa and she and her brother would come to live at Magdalena’s home on Beacon Street, among the jungle of orchids and Kentia palms, in a house that resonated like the inside of a piano.

  Now she detected something in Magdalena’s impatient remarks about Papa that made her think that the older woman had once considered the same possibility. Perhaps after Magdalena had finally been widowed, several years previously?

  “Tell me something,” Erika said, “now that I am going away.” Her fingers caressed the sofa’s velvet curve. “Were you ever the least bit in love with my father?”

  Magdalena inhaled so deeply, Erika could hear the underlying wheeze, the old struggle deep in her lungs.

  “We had a romance.”

  Startled, Erika felt her ears rise, as if they were lengthening, opening. “When?”

  “Long ago. The year after you first became my student.”

  How had she missed this? Erika wondered. Memories rushed back, clues that now made sense. As a girl of nine or ten, she had settled herself squarely in her father’s lap, thinking it odd that she smelled the scent of Magdalena’s lily-of-the-valley sachets on Papa’s cheeks, on his shirt cuffs.

  As a girl, Erika had arrived at the Beacon Street house one afternoon for her lesson just as Papa was descending Magdalena’s brick steps with his black medical bag. Was her teacher ailing? Papa made no excuse about why he’d come to call at her voice teacher’s home. Instead, he’d fished out his engraved pocket watch and opened its etched filigree cover and peeked at the time with the edge of his eyes. He’d cupped Erika’s small chin in his huge hand for a moment, given a reluctant sigh, and departed.

  “Did you ever consider marrying my father?”

  “Never,” Magdalena said. “Your father and I could never have lived well together. But we’ve shared many things. Like you, for instance. There was a period when he was a wonderful secret in my life, and he
said that I was a gift for him.”

  Erika considered the timing of when this had all occurred. When no chambermaid or adult had been around to stop her, she used to wander into her mother’s old bedroom and peer into bureaus and jewelry boxes. Curious, she had pulled open a drawer and slid a long satin glove over her hand. Her own short fingers only half-filled the empty tubes; with her other hand she pinched the limp finger ends, hoping to discover a square folded note or something left by her mother inside, but there was nothing.

  Around that time Papa used to whistle arias that Magdalena taught her. One day she had gone into Mama’s former bedroom and noticed that her mother’s clothes had finally been taken away. The dark violet Chinese dressing gown Mama had always worn no longer hung from the armoire door.

  10

  At the hospital a nurse led Doctor Ravell with terrible haste down a corridor toward a young woman who was lying on the floor in a crescent, knees bent toward her chest. The staff hovered around her, draping her arms over their shoulders as they helped the young woman hobble—doubled over and emitting coarse moans—to the nearest bed.

  Her pallor was extreme. When Doctor Ravell touched her flat belly, she flinched. Yet she had no fever. Strands of her hair felt as dry as hay when his palm brushed against her forehead. He lifted her upper lip with his thumb and saw a telltale blue line across her gums.

  “She has swallowed lead,” he told the nurse. “She’s going to abort very soon.”

  Later that evening, when her struggles had ended and the young woman rested in quiet isolation, he stopped by her bedside. No doubt she was poor—it was always the poor who presented themselves at hospitals, desperate for free care and a place to give birth apart from the dank, tenement rooms they usually shared with many others. Affluent patients had servants; the rich could afford to pay physicians to attend them while they gave birth at home. But for poor women, the hospital was the only sanctuary where they could be assured of starched sheets, and nurses who could sponge them clean and bring soup to their lips. How many a destitute mother, especially one who already had several children, could find anyone to bathe and spoon-feed her?